The present disclosure is generally related to defect description of a data storage medium. During a manufacturing certification process of a data storage medium, defective sectors can be identified and recorded in a defect description table (DDT). If a storage size allocated for a defect description table does not have sufficient capacity to record all of the defective sectors, the data storage medium may be rejected during the manufacturing certification process.
As data storage medium capacities increase with the introduction of new storage technology, the total number of defective sectors that need to be identified in the DDT increases. For example, a physically damaged media area of the data storage medium may yield more defective sectors with increased capacity for tracks per inch (TPI) or bytes per inch (BPI) on the media. All defective sectors typically need to be recorded in the defect description table, but the space requirements for recording all of the defective sectors in increasingly large data storage mediums may be more of a problem as capacities increase.
One solution to the increasing capacity requirements of defect description tables may be to increase the storage size allocated for the defect description table. However, defect description tables and user cache may both make use of buffer memory of a data storage device and unless the buffer memory is increased in size, a larger defect description table may reduce the amount of the user cache that that is available for the buffer memory. Additionally, increasing the size of the buffer memory may increase the cost of the data storage device. Cache performance may also suffer if the size of the defect description table is increased. Therefore, there is a need for an improved system and method of defect description of a data storage medium.